A Bones Life

Was a popular way of saying goodbye to a friend when I was growing up in Brooklyn. I had a couple of Jewish friends, but by and large, we didn’t really know about the Israeli-Palestinian situation. To be honest, even if we had, I doubt any of us would’ve cared.

We’re privileged to live in a country where our neighbors can’t bother us. Not only are we protected by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, but the Canadian economy also revolves around trade with the United States. Sure, we’ve gone to war with Mexico, but after getting your nose broken a few times, even the thought of a bloody nose turns you off. They don’t want war with us. Their strategy is to send their poorest citizens to America, have them work here, and send a large portion of the money they receive back home, thus helping to stimulate their local economy without Mexico having to worry about feeding and employing them.

The United States and Israel are like polar opposites in that regard. While we were able to be isolationist for a long period of time, Israel doesn’t even have the luxury of being able to stop and catch their breath.

Israel was created in the late 1940s, largely due to the Holocaust in Europe and feelings of guilt on the part of the British and American governments. If you happen to believe in an organized, monotheistic religion, all three Abrahamic faiths believe that it was granted to them by God after they were able to escape the chains of bondage as Egyptian slaves. Since their return to the Levant, the Jews have not only been surrounded by enemies on all sides, but within as well. Twenty percent of Israeli citizens are ethnic Arabs. Mind you, those are Israelis, not even Palestinians. Ninety percent of those Arabs are Muslims, while the remaining ten percent are Christians. Imagine if one-fifth of your neighbors were people that could wake up one morning and decide to blow up a school bus or a wedding ceremony. Granted, any nut here could wind up being another Timothy McVeigh, but the odds of that are significantly lower. That’s also not to say all Arab Israelis are radicals. Far from it, actually. I’m just attempting to shed some light as to the Israeli mindset. Not only do you lose your grandparents to Hitler or Stalin, but then you have to fight to keep the same from happening to your children.

There are over three hundred million Arab Muslims living in the Middle East, as opposed to six million Jews. To say the odds are stacked against them is hardly an understatement. From day one, Israel has had to fight with their neighbors in order to survive. In 1948, tiny Israel was attacked by Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Yemen, among others in the “Arab-Israeli War“. In 1967, Israel was again attacked by Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan in the “Six-Day War“.

In Munich at the 1972 Summer Olympics, the Israeli Olympic Team were murdered by Palestinian terrorists.

They have to live in fear for their lives every day. They have to draft every young adult citizen – both male and female – into their military in order to protect their families.

So when the so-called moderate King of Jordan gave an interview that was published today, he stated that if President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu are unable to come up with a deal that Arabs are willing to accept, it will show that the Obama Administration is “just another American government that is going to let [them] down”. He compared Israel to North Korea, and said that if they don’t make concessions soon, “We’re going to have a war.” So, rather than taking any of the blame for the issue, he says that if peace isn’t achieved in the near future, it’s going to be President Obama’s fault — America’s fault.

Now, I find it sadly ironic that the so-called progressive, pro-Western, free-thinking King Abdullah II of Jordan is calling for the Israeli government to offer even more land back to the Arabs when he himself has no business being in Jordan.

Abdullah is a Hashemite. That is to say, a member of the Hashemite Dynasty from what is now Saudi Arabia. In 1916, one of his Saudi Arabian ancestors led a revolt against the Turks whom had occupied most of the Arab World for several centuries, and as a result the Hashemite clan became kings of modern Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. In the decades that followed, his family managed to lose all of those kingdoms, with the exception of Jordan.

He has no right to lecture the Jews on returning lands to their supposedly rightful, pre-war owners until he himself stops collecting taxes from the indigenous people of Jordan. He wasn’t elected by the people. He is not native to Jordan. His namesake, Abdullah I, who came from Mecca, conquered Jordan in 1921.

I’d like to see a peaceful co-existence in the Middle East, just as I’d like to see a resolution to the Korean situation and, eventually, Irish reunification. That said, it’s wholly unrealistic to ask Israel to respect the wishes of “57 countries” that, as King Abdullah mentioned, refuse to recognize Israel, many of which fund terrorism and would like nothing more than to see the Israeli people forcably removed from their homes.

Sadly, it seems as though the pro-Western voices in today’s Muslim world don’t sound all that differently from the reactionaries in Iran.

In 2000, Israel offered 100% of the Gaza Strip and over 90% of the West Bank at the Camp David Summit with President Clinton and Yasser Arafat. Arafat refused the deal. It’s all-or-nothing for their side.

When Abdullah says they’ll attack Israel if they don’t make more concessions, it sounds eerily similar to when Ahmadinejad said that the occupiers of Jerusalem will vanish from the pages of time.

Now, I don’t claim to have the solution to the problem. I have no answers to contribute, only more questions. But at least if they were asking questions rather than making unrealistic demands of one-another, there could be more dialogue and more mutual understanding and less unnecessary bloodshed on both sides.